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Ama Ata Aidoo
Aidoo's spare, sharp love story follows Esi, a successful Accra statistician who leaves a husband she finds stifling, only to become the second wife of a charming businessman and confront afresh the bargains marriage demands of a modern African woman. The real city frames it: the government office where Esi works, the comfortable bungalows of the professional class, the businessman Ali's downtown enterprise, and the restaurants and streets of a booming Accra caught between tradition and change.
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Homegoing
Yaa Gyasi
Two half-sisters born in the eighteenth-century Gold Coast never meet, and the novel follows their descendants down parallel lines for two hundred and fifty years. One line stays in the Fante and Asante country of what is now Ghana, anchored on Cape Coast and its slave castle; the other is shipped across the Atlantic into American slavery and, generations later, the Great Migration north. The map centres on the Cape Coast Castle, where the two lines split, and runs inland to the Asante capital at Kumasi.
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The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
Ayi Kwei Armah
In the disillusioned Ghana of the last days of Nkrumah, an unnamed railway clerk, the Man, refuses to take the bribes that everyone around him treats as ordinary, and is despised by his own family for it. Armah keeps the harbour city deliberately unnamed, drawn from Sekondi-Takoradi: the railway control office where the Man works, the port and its coast, the filthy home block, and the room of his disillusioned friend the Teacher; the political rot has its seat far off in Accra.
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